Justice Minister Alan Shatter addressed hundreds of people of different faiths and ethnicities at the annual National Holocaust Memorial Day Commemoration in Dublin recently.
The minister said it was an occasion “to remember the six million Jewish people” who lost their lives in the Holocaust, but he also highlighted the Nazi regime’s murder of “the Roma and Sinti communities, Slavs, gay men, disabled persons, Jehovah Witnesses and dissidents”.
Among the victims, Minister Shatter noted, were more than 1.5 million children exterminated in one of the world’s single worst atrocities.
The minister also used the occasion to express his concerns over the growing support for extreme right-wing political parties across Europe.
“As Europeans, we must confront the rise in antisemitism, xenophobia, racism, homophobia and hate crimes,” he said, decrying the “corrosive and dangerous” rhetoric of the extreme right revitalised in the wake of the global economic crisis.
“For example, in Greece we have Golden Dawn; in Hungary, Jobbik; in France the Front National; in Bulgaria, Ataka and the Bulgarian National Party; and in Britain the British National Party and Ukip.
“Unfortunately, some of these are no longer on the fringes of political life and there is growing concern over the level of support they will attract in the forthcoming European Parliamentary elections.”
Minister Shatter blamed the continued rise of the extreme parties on the European governments and majority parties’ failures “to confront and denounce the prejudice they pedal and by their partial embrace of a xenophobic agenda.
“It is not enough that we remember the Holocaust,” he said. “We must also remember the moral imperative to act to unequivocally repudiate the reprehensible rhetoric of those who contaminate our political discourse and attempt to inflame dangerous prejudice.”
